ISBN 9781907230424

Pub Date Jun 17 2013

This novel, which is has a good premise, I found to be tedious with over a dozen unannounced flash back scenes which caused me to reread pages or paragraphs where I thought I lost the story line along the way. Then there are several changes from First Person to Third Person; while this is perfectly acceptable, it happens so infrequently that it almost feels like a ‘slip’.

My next pet peeve are sentences that make me wonder “How is that possible?” One example is on page 97 “A label, sewn into his coat, read N. Roach.” In this scene the main character is standing over a man sleeping who is [presumably wearing] “a tattered beige coat with crumbs on it.” The setting is winter and the man is sleeping outside. Most generic coats the label would be sewn to the inside of the coat near the collar. If this is the case, I don’t automatically assume otherwise, makes me wonder how the main character can see inside the coat to the label. This is not the only POV oversight in the book which is why I say:

If Lynnwood could be restructured and ‘tightened up’ this would be an interesting book.

1/28/2013 Update: I received the following reply from Sparkling Books pertaining to this review. Although I did not have the following experience while reading the book, I too want to be fair to the author.

We do not usually write to reviewers but in this case we think it is justified because LYNNWOOD is actually an extremely well-constructed novel.

Essentially the events are told by an omniscient narrator (who would know about the label in the coat) in third person and in the past.

There are five sections in the present told in the first person by Freya. In these sections she is writing in her diary about how she lost all her family and Eaton her dog. So actually

these sections are flash forwards and not back (because the narration is in the past and Freya’s writing is in the present). It all makes perfect sense.

For the sake of fairness towards the author, we thought we would write to tell you this.